


snowball fights are not meant for grownass men, tony

by livingtheobsessedlife



Category: Iron Man - Fandom, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, But also, Christmas, Established Relationship, F/M, Pepperony Gift Exchange, Pepperony Secret Santa 2018, Tony Stark May be a genius but he’s also SUUUUPER dumb, Tony messes up, and also Pepper is a professional and reasonable QUEEN, and that’s that, and therefore tony has to fix it, don’t worry I love and cherish Tony Stark I wouldn’t make him look bad for too long, thoughtful tony stark, thoughtless tony stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 17:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17166497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livingtheobsessedlife/pseuds/livingtheobsessedlife
Summary: Tony interrupts a business meeting by hosting an impromptu indoor snowball fight.Needless to say, Pepper is not a fan, and it causes a strain on their relationship. But it’s Christmas and Tony loves Pepper like nothing else in the universe- he’s got some fixing to do.





	snowball fights are not meant for grownass men, tony

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as part of dailypepperony’s pepperony secret Santa gift exchange on tumblr and written for pepperlovetony! I hope y’all like it! Have a happy holiday!!!

Tony Stark is an immature, selfish man-child. This is nothing new. Always had been always will be. Probably has something to do with the dangerous combination of daddy issues and a privileged childhood. But that’s besides the point. The point is: nothing new. 

The visage of Pepper Potts, soaking wet and standing at the front of a room about to give a presentation and absolutely seething beyond belief? Now that’s something new. 

“Gentlemen,” She hisses through clenched teeth, eyes narrowed dangerously on Tony, “Meet one of our rather inappropriately behaved directors. I believe you may know him as the disappointing namesake of the company.”

Tony grins and doesn’t look sheepish at all. Pepper seethes more. 

“Hey, Pep,” Tony tries one of his infamous winning grins, “Heard you could use some holiday cheer!”

“No, Tony,” Pepper grits through clenched teeth, glaring daggers, “I really couldn’t.”

“Oh,” Tony says, and the sound falls short as all the shocked gazes of the portly businessmen grimace in his direction. His eyes grow in dramatic size as all brands of realization dawn at once, “Sorry then I guess I’m just gonna-“

Tony makes a hasty retreat. 

As the glass door shuts behind him, he can hear Pepper talking, a fake, nervous laugh jumping off her lips, “Be glad he doesn’t run the company anymore, right?”

Distantly, the businessmen can be heard laughing. 

Tony gets in his Bentley and flees the premises after that, snow hitting his windshield in sheets and sliding off just so as he pulls out of the large Stark Industries parking lot at uncomfortable, non-weather-permitting speeds. 

He wonders in the back of his mind where he went wrong, the portly laughs of those businessmen and Pepper’s serene glare echoing somewhere in that big head of his. 

//////

Pepper comes back late that night, but Tony had stayed up for her anyway, hoping to catch her and apologize before he lost his chance, before The Incident became just another black mark in her book against him. 

The lights are dim, Christmas tree glowing in the corner, as he welcomes her home, offers to take her coat for her. Before he makes it to her, she shrugs it off herself, glares cooly at him. Not good. The mark has already been made, the grimace on Pepper’s expression all telling. 

“How’d your meeting end up going, Pep?” He asks, trying to sound upbeat as she makes a beeline towards the bar. 

She doesn’t respond immediately, drags out the silence as she pours herself a drink. Her eyes meets his as she takes a long sip. Her gaze is icy. Tony swallows. 

Pepper sets down her glass, fingers touching the rim like he didn’t want to let her go. Not for a moment did her eyes so much as glance away from Tony’s. They bore into him. 

“It went fine,” She says finally, slowly and deliberately, and it sounds like an icicle covered in gravel the way it grates against his good will.

“That’s Great! No harm done then! What a-“

“They almost walked out of there, Tony,” She takes a shallow, steadying breath, and Tony is painfully aware of the onslaught that’s coming his way. Her fingers grip tighter on her glass, “You almost made me lose that deal. That deal is gonna let us give millions of kids in impoverished countries free tech and you almost made us lose that.” She shakes her head- not in anger or rage, but in disappointment, and that hurts more than anything else. 

The glare she carefully narrows on him is like a laser beam caught on fire and dripping with icicles at the same time. 

“I was just trying to… spread my holiday cheer, Pep.”

She slams her glass onto the bar with more force than intended, an instinctual rejection like a scoff or a hardtipped sigh, the sound of the glass on wood reverberating with a hollow and effective energy. 

Tony watches her with wide eyes. 

“I’m tired of this, Tony,” She says, and she does sound tired, exhausted, overworked, exasperated, “I’m tired of being your babysitter all the time. I’m tired of having to explain basic rights from wrongs. You made me the CEO of your company, you call me your girlfriend. Let me be those things. But don’t make me resent you in the process.”

Tony’s heart breaks a little at that. 

He has no idea how to respond. 

“I’m gonna go,” She says, already pulling her arms through her coat sleeves, throwing her purse over her shoulder. 

“Where are you going?” Tony asks, all but begs, “It’s almost Christmas, babe.”

“I know I just… I need to get away,” She’s at the door in an instant, leaving Tony alone and shellshocked beside his bar, “Goodbye, Tony.”

The door closes ominously behind her. 

He doesn’t know where she goes after that. He has no idea for the rest of the night where she is. She doesn’t send him a single informatory call or voice mail or even so much as a three word text. Tony would know if she had. He spends the rest of the night obsessively checking his phone as he lays sleepless on the sprawling white couch in the living, the tv left on mute. The bedroom felt foreign knowing that she wouldn’t be coming back, the bed felt less like the place he shared with her every night and more like an alien spaceship. 

He has no idea where she is and no way to figure it out without blatantly disrespecting the last ounce of her privacy that Tony hasn’t taken from her already. Tony hates the feeling. 

As the night grows long and Tony is left to stew with his own thoughts, he is able to bregudgingly put the pieces together to determine at least some of the places he went wrong. The snowballs, for instance. Bad idea. Unprofessional. Not as romantic as he had thought at the dead of night. Now he knew. Now he was suffering because of it. 

It’s around three in the morning when he calls Rhodey, all but drunk off his ass, “Rho,” Tony slurs after Rhodey sleepily picks up the phone and grunts his tired hello, “I messed up, man.”

That gets him up. 

“Woah, Tony, are you alright? You need me to send backup? I can be in the suit and wherever you are in ten minutes flat, I swear. What’s going on?”

If he hadn’t been so drunk, Tony probably would’ve chosen less alarming words. 

But Tony is indeed very drunk and on the verge of destroying the best relationship he’s ever had, so yes, he chooses those words and then he groans into the phone like a mad man on the loose as Rhodey attempts to decipher Tony’s lovelorn madness. 

“Okay,” Rhodey finally says with a sigh, a hand rubbing over his face tiredly. It was going to be a long night. Morning. Whatever it was, “Look, I’m gonna come over, you can… talk or whatever. I’m not bringing the suit, okay?”

Tony makes an affirmative grunt. 

“I’ll see you in fifteen, Tony. Hang in there buddy, ‘kay?”

When Rhodey gets to the Tower, Tony’s laying on his back on the slick leather couch with his eyes glued, unblinking, to the gray and white checkered tiles of his faraway ceiling. 

“Hey, Tones,” Rhodey says from the entryway before the living room, watching as Tony stares morosely at nothing, a hand falling off the side of the couch toward the ugly carpet, “Heard you could use some talking.”

Tony huffs out a sound that comes out eerily unlike a laugh or even a scoff. It’s a whole new species of sarcastic self-derision. Rhodey doesn’t really know what to do. 

In the past, there had always been girlfriends. A couple boyfriends. They never lasted long. More often than not, Tony had been the one to break up with his newer, younger partner. A couple of them beat him to it. It was never something he had lost sleep over, let alone _this_. 

This is a whole new breed of torture. It’s scarily close to heartbreak. It’s the preliminary fracture before the rest of the organ just cracks in two like a cheaply made faberge egg. Tony can’t stop staring at the ceiling. 

The cushion above Tony’s head sinks down as Rhodey sits, Tony’s head dipping in accordance with the cushion’s added weight. Rhodey sighs. 

“What’d you do, Stark?”

“Nothing, I-,” He stops himself, blinks at the white ceiling. That’s not true. He knows it isn’t. He’s so used to an inconsequential life of ‘not my fault’s that he didn’t realize when things changed, Pepper became his consequence and forced him to realize for once that oh, this whole disaster is completely and entirely fabricated by his own two hands- crap. He sighs dramatically, eyes blinking quickly, “I did everything,” He admits solemnly, regretfully and full of woe like something straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy. Tony isn’t a fan of this new lifestyle, of feeling the weight of his actions. Dammit, Pepper, “I ruined the whole thing, Rhodes. I- I don’t know what to do.”

Rhodey doesn’t know what to do either. 

For all of Tony’s litany of problems that Rhodey has fixed over the years, he’s never once had to help mend Tony’s relationship. Tony’s never had a relationship that lasted long enough to even need mending. Ergo: new territory. 

Slowly and uncomfortably, Rhodey reaches a hand out to rest on Tony’s shoulder in an attempt at comfortable reassurance. It doesn’t work all that great. 

In the end, they just sit in silence. In a weird way, it helps. Knowing he isn’t at least totally alone without Pepper, that even though he maybe totally just messed up the best thing that’s ever happened to him, at least he had Rhodey in his corner to offer whatever helping hand he could, allowed Tony’s thoughts to settle and drift softly, like feathers falling to the cement floor. 

At midnight, Tony’s head is almost completely empty, nothing left but a thinly veiled trace of his self-derision and a trickling of thoughts of one thing only: _Pepper, Pepper, Pepper, Pepper_.

 

////////

He finds her at the office on Christmas. 

She’s Pepper fucking Potts, of course she’s at the office. Hell, it’s the first place he checks. 

Her car is the only one in the parking lot, a single shining black Mercedes in a sea of empty cement and yellow lines. She gave the rest of the company the day off. Stark Industries valued their employees like that. No, _Pepper_ valued her employees like that. 

For all the thoughtlessness that permeated Tony’s genius mind, Pepper was everything that made an amazing boss, an invaluable CEO to the company that bore his name. Tony was lucky as all hell to have such a professional running his company and despite recent grievances, he knew that he was just as lucky to have such a talented, inspiring woman come home to him every night.

Well, almost every night. Not last night. 

Tony winces at the thought of last night’s empty bed, tries not to think too hard about where else she may have gone. 

He makes his way through the empty halls until he finds her office with its big doors and her name engraved grandly in big gold letters right on the front. A light could be seen through the opening under the door, the filtering reminder of insomnia and workaholism and a near-tattered relationship. 

Tony tries for a deep breath, though it wavers impotently, and wraps a hand around the door handle. Without so much as a knock, he pulls the door open and sticks his head in.

“Can we talk?”

She doesn’t so much as look up. Her left fist twitches nominally and that’s about all Tony gets from her: the vaguest of acknowledgements and that irritated scratch of a pen on paper. Tony quietly closes the door behind him and enters the room fully. 

“I know you don’t want to see me right now, Pep,” Tony says, shoving his free hand into his pocket, “But it’s Christmas and I wanted to give you your present. And apologize. And I just…” He takes a deep breath finally, looks down like he can’t look at her anymore, because her gaze is seering into him, impassive and intimidating like nothing else, “I just wanted to see you, okay?”

Pepper caps her pen, crosses her arms across her chest and leans back in her chair as far as it will allow, glancing at him over her large glass desk like an Austin Powers villain. 

“You got me a present?”

“Yeah, I wanted to give it to you this morning when we… that doesn’t matter. Yes, I got you a present,” He rubs the back of his neck, “I took in all your comments after the Giant Bunny Incident, so this one is comparably much smaller. Not even all that pricy. I was thinking about you and all the good you’ve done and I thought you’d like this…”

Pepper raises a judgemental eyebrow, “You… thought of me?”

“Pepper, I’m always thinking about you. You gotta understand that.”

She looks surprised by that, leans forward again in a wordless sort of okay, nods minutely. 

Tony takes his chance, taking a few large steps toward her sprawling glass desk to give her the small package in his left hand. 

It’s very obvious that he wrapped it himself, one side slightly lopsided and the other with an excess of paper, all wrapped in a tightly wound and disappointingly crooked bow. It’s not a good looking present by any means. However, by Pepper’s Tony Stark Thoughtfulness standards, it’s magnificent, a work of art, damn near a masterpiece. She just sits there and stares at the packaging in her hands for a weirdly long time as Tony lingers nearby and watches nervously. 

“You’re allowed to open it, you know,” Tony says quietly after an uncomfortable amount of time has passed, a gentle reminder meant to quell his own anxiety, an attempt at humor to break up some of the room’s palpable nerves. 

She looks up and glares at him (it’s a glare she’s mastered over the years, a glare that means ‘I’m not stupid, Tony Stark, get over yourself’- Tony knows exactly what it means and shrinks back), but immediately starts to pull at the tape and wrapping paper despite her contrary expression. 

It’s a large necklace box, something she’s familiar with. Tony’s always been a fan of buying himself out of trouble with sweet talking and fancy things. 

“Tony,” She says with a sigh, looking up at him with an inscrutable grimace, “You can’t-“

“It isn’t what you think. Just open it.”

She looks skeptical, suspicious, but carefully opens the box and “What is this?”

It’s a picture of a young girl, probably somewhere between the ages of 16 and 19, smiling like all hell on graduation day. 

“It’s not the most romantic gift in the world, I can get you something more tangible if you want it, but that there is the first ever recipient of the Pepper Potts Amazing Women of the Future Scholarship.”

“...What?”

“I can get you more if you think it’s not romantic enough or whatever, I actually have a necklace in my glove box I could run out and get, but… I made a scholarship in your name. It’s for young women who are independent and strong and can change the world. This is the first recipient.”

Pepper stares at the picture for a long time. 

“What’s her name?” Pepper asks, monotone and wide eyed, curious. 

“Henrietta,” Tony responds with a smile, “She’s from Queens. She actually goes to Peter’s school! She’s a great kid. Top marks, volunteers constantly, and a great mind to boot. Only problem was that she doesn’t come from the greatest family. Her brothers each work two jobs, her mom three, and their dad isn’t in the picture. She’ll be the first in her family to go to college. I hope it’s alright that I also offered her brothers better jobs at Stark Industries than the two they have now. They’re all good kids, hard workers, but she wants more, wants to be more. She reminded me of you,” Pepper says nothing, so Tony does what he does best and continues rambling, “When I first met her, you know what she told me? That my tie was crooked. It wasn’t, not really, well, kinda, but I’d taken the convertible and it was in a room full of high schoolers and I never would’ve thought anybody would have the balls to tell me I looked anything other than absolutely superb. She looked me dead in the eyes, too, which frankly reminded me of you. She had that fire. I knew that she was gonna get the scholarship before I even interviewed her. Kinda like you with this job, with everything. Pepper, I always knew you would be great. Because you’re everything, you’re-“

“Tony,” She says sharply, interrupts him like a rubber band snapping. He shuts his mouth immediately.

Slowly, she pulls her eyes away from the photograph, of the smiling young girl whose life Tony just singelhandedly altered forever. He did that. He did that for Pepper, from the good of his heart. Because he saw what she did, who she was, and he wanted to try to be better because of it. Pepper’s heart swells. 

When Pepper looks up at Tony again, her eyes are wet. 

“Tony,” She says again, because she doesn’t know what else, “Thank you.”

Tony manages a tight lipped smile, “Merry Christmas, babe.”

Pepper stands up from behind her desk and wordlessly meets Tony in the middle, a sort of shocked, undecided expression trapped on her face. 

“Tony,” She breathes, a repeat of a repeat of an undecided next word, “Tony, thank you,” She says, breathless. 

Without any more preamble, Pepper wraps her arms around him and pulls him tight. Finally, Tony let’s himself breathe, and it feels like the first time since he had stepped out of that conference room the day before that he’s been able to do so. 

They stand like that for a long time, wordless and appreciative and in each other’s arms after much too long, after one mistake after another. 

“Merry Christmas, Tony,” Pepper says softly, her voice barely above a whisper.

Tony smiles into her hair, his eyes fluttering closed as he presses a kiss to her temple, “I love you, Pep. I’m sorry for everything.”

She rubs a hand along his arm, shushes him gently, “I forgive you,” She says and allows the silence to settle back into place. After another long moment, she pulls away slightly, a hand grasped on his bicep, “You still know you were kinda an idiot, right?”

“Oh, _totally_.”

“Good,” She says, finding his shoulder again, “Because you totally were.”

“I’m working on it, Pep,” He responds quietly, almost sadly, “I’m working really hard to think before I do things. I gotta think about you now because you’re number one. No matter what I do that may seem like it’s the contrary, you’re number one. Always. I’m doing my best to prove that to you.”

“I know,” She says, “I know. And I appreciate it, really.”

He presses one last kiss to her temple, smiling, “Merry Christmas, Pepper.”

They interlace their fingers together, soft smiles on their faces, “What do you say we go get some Christmas breakfast, huh?”

Tony grins, just like always does, and tugs at her hand, “Oh, that sounds perfect. Something greasy, definitely greasy.”


End file.
